“Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time” is two documentaries in one.
It’s a film about the life and work of Kurt Vonnegut, and on that score it covers most of the bases and captures what it was that made Vonnegut the quintessential pop-philosopher novelist of his era — the quips and catchphrases and sci-fi curlicues, the whimsically upbeat cynicism of his chain-smoking Mark-Twain-of-the-counterculture image, the way that, in “Slaughterhouse-Five” (1969), he took his experiences as a witness to the bombing of Dresden in World War II and turned them into a mythology of war that caught the despair and bitter insanity of the Vietnam era, and the fact that he wrote fervently, obsessively, but always in the spry, plainspoken, wit-as-dry-as-kindling voice of the Midwestern scion of Indianapolis he was.
If you want a handy primer on one of the fabled writers of his time, “Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time” will more than do.
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